Nescire aude.

April 29, 2006

I'm sure we're all familiar with the joke about the man who goes to a café and orders a cup of coffee, with no milk. Not long after placing his order, the waiter returns to his table (for it's that kind of café) and, with downcast face, tells him that they're out of milk—would he accept his coffee with no cream?

Now, the first time I heard, or possibly read, this joke, the man at the cafe was identified as Jean-Paul Sartre. But this is ridiculous! The joke is clearly about determinate negation, and the patron ought, rightly, be G.W.F. Hegel, in search of his Tasse Kaffee.

Relatedly, the Mexican restaurant at the corner of San Antonio and California will serve one an insanely large quantity of pork confit for $7.50. My belief is that if a pig has led a virtuous life, its shoulder is made into carnitas.

April 27, 2006

Charlottenburg is a fine part of the city, so long as you like the limp flesh of the newly dead. The deafening silence that answers every word, thought, and breath is the heedless zombieism of the middle class as they unthinkingly bring up their children to feast on the watered-down ideas of socialism that they will all embrace with enough dry heat to almost be passion for seven years while in university. But otherwise passion is a highly suspicious thing, engaged in by indecent people. That's why nothing is open after 8, because that's when indecent people gather to defile the zombie corpses of the flash-frozen bourgeoisie - necrophilia is the only sin there is, because it indicates a secret love of the dead, who hate themselves with, yes, passion.

So I suppose instead of pooh-poohing Charlottenburg, I meant to draw it on the body of the city as an erogenous zone erroneously penetrated, as you might remember from that hilarious night with the stripper with the glass eye that kept popping out.

April 21, 2006

A post about esoteric programming languages on MeFi reminded me of two things:1. I once wrote an Unlambda interpreter in Python, whose chief virtue was that it was insanely slow. I think I have the source code around somewhere still. (I do.) I'm not sure if it was ever actually correct, though, because I think I tested it by running it on Unlambda quines and while it worked on some of them I think it didn't work on others? It had/has a pretty obtuse implementation strategy.2. I also once wrote a Python module that allowed one to write code that looked like this. Some of that module cheats (for instance, strings like "os.remove" really ought to be something like (".", "os", "remove"), though I can't recall if that's precisely correct), but it does actually do what it was supposed to do. Writing this way allowed you to have real nested scopes at a time when Python didn't actually support them, but was in every other respect sort of difficult and not worth it.

April 16, 2006

April 15, 2006

Remember when Matt Yglesias got his position at The American Prospect? Of course you do—for members of our generation, the blog generation, it's analogous to knowing where you were when you found out that Bambi's mother had been killed. Everyone had nothing but congratulations for the young man setting off into legitimate journalism. But really, why should anyone have thought positively of his so-called "accomplishment"? For have we not known, at least since the days of Korzybski and Borges, that TAP is not meritory?

April 08, 2006

list 4 songs (by different artists please) that meet the following criteria: (a) You have not listened to the song in a long time. I'm thinking like 2 years minimum but adjust this limit at your discretion. (b) You can hear the song in your head, just by closing your eyes and willing it. (Well you know what I mean; it's debatable how strongly "will" enters into this activity.) (c) You would gladly listen to it right now. Optionally, write a little squib about the song, why you like it, why you have not listened to it, where you know it from, etc.

I'm not sure I could be very certain that I haven't listened to any particular song in two years. Two is a lot of years! And I don't necessarily have a lot of memory, so to a large extent this list is going to be created by looking through my playlists and finding the first things that meet the criteria. The easiest ones to produce are the bad EBM/goth-like songs that I know I haven't listened to in a long time because I deleted them.

Current 93, "Hitler as Kalki". This song is about 16 minutes long, and not exactly melodic, so I can't hear that much of it in my head, except for David Tibet's voice intoning the chorus and "But not in Bethlehem" (and, since I had to look up the lyrics online to get the city name (not because I don't know what Bethlehem is, but because the last one in the list is Chorazaim, and who can remember that?), I can get him singing the other lines, too), and the sound of the somewhat hypnotic guitar filling the whole thing. When I got this album I was disappointed because it's a bigass double album and this was the only song I liked.

Bauhaus, "She's in Parties". See what I mean? I actually still have the C93 on disk, but actually I still have this too, along with four other Bauhaus songs and a Bauhaus cover by Faith and the Muse. How about that? It turns out I haven't deleted the three Covenant tracks I have either. Bizarre.

Syd Barrett, "Terrapin". This and "Golden Hair" are the only Barrett tracks I've heard that I like.

The Pixies, "Hang on to Your Ego". I have no idea if I've listened to this in the past two years. Probably. Also, I don't like it much. But I'm listening to it now, so I guess I wouldn't mind listening to it now. This one might not count, though, because I've certainly heard the Beach Boys original somewhat recently. So a fifth:

Smog, "Dress Sexy at My Funeral". I got Dongs of Sevotion not long after it came out but didn't like it much, aside from this track.

April 05, 2006

Now I know that I shall never allow myself to call a day "a perfect day" without having the certainty that what was good about it for me had conquered my body—up to the point indeed of giving me the feeling that I was, somehow, the embodiment of that perfect day.

Is this not the same lesson we take from the C&H strip in which Calvin opines that if, at the end of the day, one does not have grass stains on one's knees, one ought seriously to reëvaluate one's life? Consider also in this light the strip in which Calvin recounts the various things that have imprinted themselves on his body throught the day and concludes that he considers it seized, and goes on to proclaim that "tomorrow we'll seize the day and throttle it".

It is no doubt significant that both of these reflections are made while Calvin bathes.